He ran for president from his prison cell. Immediately after its passage in 1917, American socialist leader Eugene V Debs was arrested and imprisoned under the Espionage Act – simply for criticizing the US decision to enter the first world war. Yet another problem with the Espionage Act is that it has never been applied uniformly. Just because they're in power doesn't mean they're right. But this is the same Justice Department that harassed, surveilled, wiretapped and threatened Martin Luther King Jr, and that recently allowed weapons to be sold to Mexican drug gangs in the Fast and Furious scandal. The Justice Department approved the torture, after all, and the US supreme court said that the NSA's eavesdropping program was constitutional. The administration and its national security sycophants in both parties in Congress argue that governmental actions exposed by the whistleblower are legal. The administration simply presses forward with wild accusations against the whistleblower: "He's aiding the enemy!" "He put our soldiers lives in danger!" "He has blood on his hands!" Then, when it comes time for trial, the espionage charges invariably are either dropped or thrown out. That the whistleblower has the support of groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or the American Civil Liberties Union matters not a whit. Any whistleblower who goes public in the name of protecting human rights or civil liberties is accused of helping the terrorists. First, it was anarchism, then socialism, then communism. Washington has always needed an "ism" to fight against, an idea against which it could rally its citizens like lemmings. This policy decision smacks of modern-day McCarthyism. The president has chosen to ignore the legal definition of whistleblower – any person who brings to light evidence of waste, fraud, abuse or illegality – and has prosecuted truthtellers. Some of the investigations began during the Bush administration, as was the case with NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, but Espionage Act cases have been prosecuted only under Obama. Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, declared a war on whistleblowers virtually as soon as they assumed office. But many of these perversions, or at least efforts to cover them up or justify them, have continued under President Obama.
Many of us believed that the torture policy was solely a Bush-era perversion. Some issues are black-and-white – and torture is one of them. It was my punishment for blowing the whistle on the CIA's torture program and for confirming to the press, despite government protestations to the contrary, that the US government was, indeed, in the business of torture.Īt the CIA, employees are trained to believe that nearly every moral issue is a shade of grey. All three espionage charges were eventually dropped. The other espionage charge was for giving the same unclassified business card to a reporter for ABC News. I gave him no classified information – only the business card of a former CIA colleague who had never been undercover. Two of my espionage charges were the result of a conversation I had with a New York Times reporter about torture. (I was only the second person in US history to be charged with violating the IIPA, a law that was written to be used against rogues like Philip Agee.) In early 2012, I was arrested and charged with three counts of espionage and one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA). The three espionage charges against me made me one of "the Obama Seven". The effect of the charge on a person's life – being viewed as a traitor, being shunned by family and friends, incurring massive legal bills – is all a part of the plan to force the whistleblower into personal ruin, to weaken him to the point where he will plead guilty to just about anything to make the case go away. Only ten people in American history have been charged with espionage for leaking classified information, seven of them under Barack Obama.
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